Find the perfect theme for your blog

Watson

Bold and sophisticated.

Your content deserves the best.

Watson was influenced by the bold strokes and clean lines of classic newspapers and magazines. We obsessed about the typography, ensuring your words were clear and readable. We made strong choices — emphasizing your content, while cutting out the cruft. The sidebar disappears when viewing a individual post, maximizing and clarifying the reading experience. Give your posts that professional feel with ten built-in typographic styling options.

Add some style.

Make it your own.

Personalizing your new website should be fun. We’ve leveraged the built-in WordPress customizer, so adding your own background image or color is easy. On top of that, you can use the Custom Design upgrade to set your own primary color for links and buttons with the built in color picker. Combine these colors with a custom background to match your brand and give your website a truly unique look.

Get noticed.

Feature your articles.

We built a simple slider into the Watson front page to help your important articles get more attention and give your website that polished look. Check a box while writing a post and it will automatically show up in the slider. We’ve also included an optional row of thumbnails for any additional featured stories you want to mix in to the home page.

Help and additional information

If you need help with Basis be sure to read through the Watson documentation by clicking the Support button at the top of the sidebar on this page. You can also ask us questions in the WordPress.com Watson support forum.

Posts that are included in the featured slider will not appear in the default blog post listing. Since the posts in the featured slider are included at the top of this listing, they will not appear a second time in that same listing. Featured slider posts will, however, display in archives and RSS feeds.

Featured thumbnails

The featured thumbnails are displayed after the second post in your post list, on your home page.

To add a post to the featured thumbnails:

Go to the Edit Post screen for your post.

Check the “Show in featured thumbnails” box in the Watson Theme Post Options meta box:

Sidebar and footers

To add items to your sidebar or two footer areas, navigate to the Appearance → Widgets screen on your admin dashboard.

Watson’s sidebar cannot be disabled. If empty, the sidebar will display a message explaining how to add sidebar widgets.

Recently Discussed widget

The Watson Theme Recently Discussed widget is featured in the sidebar of the demo site. The widget was designed to be placed in the sidebar, and probably shouldn’t be placed in either footer simply because it won’t look as nice.

The widget displays the featured image, title, and date of last comment for your 3 most recently commented posts.

The Watson Theme Recently Discussed widget will not be carried over if you switch themes.

Slideshows in posts and pages

To add a slideshow on a post or page, add your gallery; then, paste the following shortcode into your page content, replacing the default [gallery] shortcode:

[gallery slider="true"]

To autostart a slideshow within a post or page, include autostart="true" into the shortcode, like so:

Stats & Info

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Oodles of gorgeous WordPress themes for your blog

You can change the look of your blog with over 370 attractive WordPress themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar.